#48
Even those who don’t know much about half-demons know that they are divided into two categories.
That wasn’t a secret mystery.
Even in stories that had continued for hundreds of years, even in tales related to curses, two types of power always appeared.
Half-demon curses utilize two elements: emotions and memories.
Fear, anger, affection, despair. Emotional curses that easily dig into such emotions and manipulate people at will.
Fragments of the past, distorted recollections, memory curses that erase or create forgotten truths.
The most powerful ones can use curses of both elements, but the rest can only use one.
Beings who possessed both attributes were extremely rare, and whenever such beings appeared, history would be shaken.
However, at this time, among weak half-demons, there were cases where those with no talent for curses manifested those attributes through their constitution.
They don’t use curses.
Instead, their very existence affects their surroundings.
Making memories hazy, shaking emotions, making the judgment of people around them blurry.
In some ways, such people were more like disasters to ordinary people.
Unconscious stimulation.
A heterogeneous atmosphere where unknown discomfort and attraction came simultaneously.
The power to shake people even without doing anything.
Having a constitution that stimulates emotions meant, in other words, that the Prince belonged to this case.
And that fact was quite a sensitive issue for Sercil.
‘Though it’s only a hypothesis, since that Archduke said it, I should consider it certain.’
Skyle Rodias.
That name meant the same as ‘one who is excessively accurate’ to Sercil.
He doesn’t speak of things easily, nor does he easily leak information without certainty.
Sercil bit his lips tightly.
The corners of his mouth were firmly closed, and his lower jaw was stiff with slight tension.
He didn’t have any particular complaints against the Prince personally. However, if the Archduke’s words were true, Sercil had to change his attitude toward the Prince.
That was a duty.
As the heir of the Margrave Lindea family, he was in a position where he shouldn’t act according to emotions.
Because constitution is 100 percent influenced by bloodline.
That’s different from ordinary magic.
It’s not something gained through training, nor is it something controlled through practice.
Bloodline, birth, instinct.
In the end, it was something like an inescapable fate.
‘The Prince should already be considered to have a constitution related to memory.’
This thought wasn’t simple speculation.
The reason Sercil was more closely and actively serving and attending to the Prince?
That couldn’t be explained by the simple reasons visible on the surface.
It wasn’t just because his personality was affectionate.
Sercil’s affection wasn’t applied equally to everyone.
There were targets he unconsciously felt close to, and the Prince was someone who induced particularly special reactions among them.
He, Sercil was already investigating the Prince on his own.
And he was collecting small clues that no one else knew, one by one.
And there was one thing he was certain of.
He was convinced.
It was a conclusion reached after logic, speculation, and repeated observation.
The conviction that the Prince had an unusual constitution related to memory.
This wasn’t simply forgetting the past, but could be the ability to distort the flow of specific memories, or even intervene with others’ emotions within them.
‘No memories before age seven?’
This was too clear a characteristic to be seen as coincidence.
A typical sign of memory constitution.
Half-demons with memory-type constitution are difficult to recognize.
They often affect others ‘without even knowing it themselves.’
People around them change, relationships become distorted, but the one at the center does nothing.
It would be even more so for someone like Sercil, who had almost never encountered half-demons.
He had witnessed a half-demon’s curse only once in his lifetime, and even that from very far away.
But Sercil had his mother.
Margrave Lindea.
He was the head of a family older than the imperial house, and a ruler who guarded the unstable southern borders.
Margrave Lindea was someone who possessed much miscellaneous common knowledge about half-demons, and that knowledge flowed out like stories in quiet conversations.
Sometimes during meals, sometimes while drinking tea.
By chance, a piece of knowledge he had heard from his mother came to mind.
That story he heard at his bedside in childhood—
Constitution that erases memories, instinct that draws out emotions, all of those things were now fitting together like puzzle pieces in his head.
“Unless they’re openly cursed, the ones ordinary people should be more wary of than strong half-demons are half-demons born with constitutional traits.”
“Why is that, Mother?”
“They go around affecting all sorts of places without even knowing they’re the eye of the storm. The more active the person, the more so.”
“I can understand if it’s emotional constitution, but how does memory-type affect others?”
“It starts with defending themselves, and ultimately leads to abandoning themselves. The past denial stage is still okay. But if they reach the self-denial stage, they become emotionless monsters.”
“Do you mean they have antisocial personality disorder?”
“No. They appear extremely normal, but in fact they have no emotions. They know what emotions are. Terrible things happen because they know and use them.”
“If we’re careful……”
“Yes. We must be careful. If discovered, it’s better to kill them immediately or stay away.”
“Mm…… Then how do we discover them? They could just be ordinary people who really lost their memories.”
“There’s one fact people don’t know well. Powerful half-demon bloodlines can’t suffer from amnesia. If a half-demon says they have no memories, it would be safe to just avoid them. But if one of their parents is a powerful half-demon? Then you must avoid them at all costs.”
He remembers his mother putting her index finger to her lips and going ‘shh,’ saying it was one of the facts hidden by the monsters of the capital.
That scene was particularly vivid even among old memories.
The room was dyed with evening light falling through the window, and his mother was sitting close to her son, whispering.
“Shh. This is a story hidden by the monsters of the capital.”
What was more frightening than the threat contained in those words was his mother’s gaze.
Serious pupils. There was no strength at the corners of her mouth, her fingertips were gentle, but her voice contained an inexplicable desperation.
Sercil’s eyes darkened.
The memories of that time rippled like waves and settled in his chest.
His eyelids became slightly heavy, and his shoulders drooped downward without him knowing.
For such reasons, he had been judging over the past few days that Ersen was highly likely to be a dangerous person.
His gaze became increasingly cold.
That judgment wasn’t speculation swayed by emotions.
It was conviction quietly strung together from observation, analysis, and fragmented information.
But just now, he had heard an even more terrible hypothesis.
His breath caught lightly in his throat.
His mind went blank for a moment, and his whole body became chilled from within.
Concubine Eris…… was the last pure-blood demon?
Each of those words pressed heavily on his chest.
‘Eris,’ and ‘demon,’ ‘last,’ ‘pure-blood.’
Each was a word with powerful destructive force individually.
If the Prince had both emotional and memory constitutions.
That would be an existence beyond simple disaster.
An essentially dangerous structure that could break people down without even being conscious of it himself.
‘He won’t know love.’
Sercil’s thoughts reached a conclusion quietly, yet cruelly.
That wasn’t sympathy but judgment.
He wouldn’t be sincere to anyone, and actions that appeared sincere were very likely all for the purpose of exploitation……
Making them believe it’s affection, keeping them close, waiting for opportunities.
Piercing through someone’s heart like that.
If that was his way of survival?
It was frightening.
A kind of fear he had never felt before was quietly growing inside his body.
And it was terrible.
The shape of that fear wasn’t simple danger, but closer to despair overlapping with the past.
Because now it was almost certain that Concubine Eris was the one who cursed his mother.
That fact was simple like a sentence, but too heavy to accept.
‘Such bloodline couldn’t just be born randomly.’
That wasn’t coincidence.
He really thought so.
Not just any half-demon, but Concubine Eris, the last pure-blood demon, gave birth to exactly one child, and if that was someone with such an unusual constitution.
Whether it was intention or plan, it wasn’t coincidence.
In some way, the possibility of being related to the curse on Sercil’s family was.
That wasn’t an endlessly expanding assumption, but a reality slowly closing in.
‘A curse that makes you kill the one you love.’
Those words repeated slowly as if being carved in his mind.
That was the curse he inherited from his mother.
He didn’t know how that curse started or when it manifested.
But the mere fact that it existed thoroughly restricted Sercil’s life.
If a Lindea’s emotional wavelength toward someone rose above a certain level, that someone dies.
The height of emotion becomes a death sentence.
The causes of death were various.
Illness, accident, self-harm, murder.
But whatever the method, the result was one.
In some way, without fail.
There were no exceptions.
And that too, right before the eyes of the Lindea in question.
A curse that had no choice but to destroy first what was loved most.
Sercil was a body that proved this curse didn’t end with one generation by inheriting this curse completely.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
